It's not the heat, it's the lucidity.

The cat spread out on the patio like peanut butter on toast.  The hotter it got, the wider and flatter she became. I wondered how much the mercury would have to rise before she ended up pooling up—a melted milkshake with a tail.

“Would mercury work on the planet Mercury?,” I asked my imaginary friend.

“A Mercury doesn’t work on Earth; those cars are pieces of crap,” he said.  A blue dragonfly darted near him, then buzzed through his imaginary head.  My friend was wearing a fuzzy pink bathrobe and sipping a mint julep from a plastic Slurpee cup.  He glanced at the dragonfly and gestured the universal sign language for “shoo.” But as the dragonfly lacked my imagination, it flew away out of simple boredom.  

“No … I mean mercury in a thermometer.”

“I don’t know,” my tutelary admitted. “I’ve never been to Mercury.” He paused, perhaps to ponder the boiling point of mercury—or perhaps to burp. “But if you think this is hot, you should go to Venus.  It’s nigh on 900 degrees out there, rains sulfuric acid … and forget about getting a decent cannoli.”

“You can’t get a decent cannoli here. If you haven’t noticed, we’re out in the middle of nowhere!”

“Yeah, but you know what we have here?” he asked. And with that, he stood up, winked, and shed his fuzzy pink bathrobe. Before the terrycloth hit the deck near the melting cat, he transformed into a winged jaguar and hovered—with deft flaps—ten feet above the patio, waiting for my answer.

“Good mushrooms,” I replied. “Good mushrooms.”

Note: the boiling point of mercury is 674.1° F. Temperatures on Mercury can fluctuate bewteen -279 and 801° F.  We can assume, then, that a mercury thermometer would not be pratcical on Mercury--as would very little else. It's also interesting to note that, although farther from the Sun, Venus is much hotter because it has an atmosphere comprised mostly of carbon dioxide. So write your legilsature; global warming is real, man. I would also suggest that, if women are really from Venus, they're messed up. Sulfuric acid rain? C'mon, ladies, why you gotta hate like that?